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124 | Beata Kovacs not simply an individual emotion or a personal matter that only exists in the realm of privacy, but it is also visible at the group level, and it can therefore play a significant social and political role, such as in terrorism (Burkitt 2005), in unemployment (Barbalet 1998), in elite circulation (Barbalet 1998), in consumption (Miller 1998), in politics (Marcus 2000), in social movements (Jasper 2011), and in economic processes (Berezin 2009). Although fear has mostly been studied as an individual emotion, recent years’ research has altered this tradition and found that fear is fuelled politically and socially by the inadequacies of power structures and sheds light on individual vulnerabilities (Barbalet and Demertzis 2013). At the social level, therefore, the object of fear is not primarily manifested in imminent physical threats, but it is rather based on social inequalities. Fear appears to a greater extent in those social groups which are in subordinate or vulnerable positions. David Kemper (1978; 1987), for example, explains the appearance of fear with the overuse of power and the lack of power. Emotions can also exist at the epochal level, that is their presence can define an entire era (Jasper 2006). Many social scientists argue that we live in an age of uncertainty and fear nowadays. The starting point of the sociology of risk and uncertainty is that everything which was thought to be secure and permanent once, lately has become eroded and lost its credit. Therefore, people have to live their lives without solid foundations and a stable social framework. Zygmunt Bauman uses the terms of ‘liquid fear’ and ‘liquid modernity’ to describe this phenomenon (Bauman 2005; 2006). According to him, in liquid modernity life changes faster than it can become a routine or habit, and because of this rapid change in our circumstances, we have no chance of making reliable calculations for the future. The unpredictability of modernity and the diffuse nature of our fears are also described in the concept of risk society by Ulrich Beck. The risk society is not based on knowledge, but on ignorance. Our world is essentially postrational, where the unforeseen side effect is the engine of change (Beck 1998). One of the symptoms of modernity is the emergence of the precariat social class, which is rooted in absolute uncertainty. The members of the precariat mostly try to support themselves from casual work and they do not own any form of job security that employees and working class have acquired for themselves in the welfare state era. They are essentially rootless, because they do not belong to any community and do not have any stable, permanent form of identity (Standing 2011). The moral dimension is also an important aspect of fear studied as a social phenomenon. Until the First World War, fear was fundamentally based on the moral perception of good and bad things. In other words, people feared primarily the negative consequences of their inappropriate actions. This belief was also generated by the fact that the laws of human survival were mostly embedded in religious stories at that time. However, from the 1920s, the way of thinking about fear has completely changed, as the intellectual
